This cartoon by @BrookesTimes sums up what a lot of people are thinking right now. This, from Peter Brookes, is brilliant. pic.twitter.com/2i4mvGu7va — Stig Abell (@StigAbell) June 16, 2017 READ MORE ‘Queen meets Grenfell Tower residents as anger...

Apparently still no sign of the promised additional help on the ground according to the BBC. If it wasn’t so tragic I would be calling for the UN to air drop supplies and tents on to the scrubs. Also head of the council thinks they were effective. FFS.

It’s about time we had a national period of mourning and books of condolence. I know it doesn’t bring back lost lives but shows survivors they are heard and also a outlet for most of us who feel touched by this tragic and criminal event.

Amusing as always but the reasons an answers will, as always, be rather more mundane. 1970s tower blocks up and down the country have been refurbished, including cladding, thousand of them. The fitness for purpose of building regs, compliance, oversight etc will ask need investigating. Regulation itself should only ever be seen as a minimum, a risk based approach to fire safety will ensure all hazards are identified and managed, I suspect this hadn’t been done in any coordinated fashion. The initial knee jerk reaction from politicians and the public should be ignored and the hard work started to ensure the appropriate fire safety mitigations and engineering changes are made. Each design of building will be different and will demand different solutions. I still think this is potentially a twenty billion pound problem.

1970s tower blocks up and down the country have been refurbished, including cladding, thousand of them. The fitness for purpose of building regs, compliance, oversight etc will ask need investigating. Regulation itself should only ever be seen as a minimum, a risk based approach to fire safety will ensure all hazards are identified and managed, I suspect this hadn’t been done in any coordinated fashion.

The problem is that what you’ve said could have been said after the 2009 Lakanal House fire and particularly after the coroners report was published in 2013. Unfortunately the people responsible for making changes dragged their feet thereby allowing the contractors to deploy polythene filled panels instead of the architects’ recommendation of more expensive aerolam (aluminium honeycomb) type panels. It really doesn’t take much in the way of web searches to find multiple incidents around the world (mostly in Dubai & China) where non flame retardant panels have accelerated the spread of fire across a building. The risks were already widely understood within the construction industry.

Fortunately the police aren’t regarding it as ‘mundane’ and are running a criminal investigation. Hopefully anyone found guilty of steering around the existing regulations or indeed delaying the process of amending the regulations will be sent to prison. This wasn’t an accident.

That deals with this incident and from what I know tower blocks across the country have or are being checked for this type of panel and or the involvement of this particular contractor. As has been really demonstrated at Laknal, holding people accountable and expecting regulatory changes to happen does not equate to a safe design. Other industries learnt this lesson a long time ago and introduced the concept of mandatory key hazard certification. This approach was led by the aviation industry (planes falling out of the sky was bad for business) and has been adopted elsewhere. Rail, Road, Marine, Offshore, Nuclear etc.

Until the day someone could tell me who the Duty Holder responsible for the design as underpinned by key hazard certificationn was, I will remain highly sceptical about the safety of these tower blocks.

I have a horrible feeling that the government would love to point the finger at the contractor whilst at the same time declaring the overall approach to fire safety remained sound. That would be the worse of outcomes, but certainly the cheapest.